Jodi Picoult imagines a woman behind Shakespeare’s words

Jodi Picoult is no stranger to bestseller lists – or controversy. For more than three decades, she has turned out issue-driven blockbusters that zero in on sensitive moral issues including race, LGBTQ+ rights, and the death penalty.  

“By Any Other Name” takes on another lightning rod topic: the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays. Picoult’s extensively researched and richly imagined novel embraces the theory that a stable of writers – including a woman named Emilia Bassano – actually wrote the Bard of Avon’s plays. 

In a fascinating author’s note, Picoult clearly presents her arguments in favor of Bassano’s authorship. She also writes, “I get a lot of hate mail – it’s part of the job when one’s novels cover gun control, abortion rights, Covid, and more – but I’m expecting the antagonism to be off the charts for this novel.” Apparently hell hath no fury like a Stratfordian Shakespeare loyalist scorned.  

“By Any Other Name” features a braided narrative about two women playwrights: Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Italian-born musicians who played at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and Melina Green, a 2013 graduate of Bard College (wink, wink) from Connecticut. In order to have their work produced and their voices heard, both of these women, born centuries apart, need to pretend their plays were written by a man. 

Emilia, based on an actual woman who in 1611 became the first published female poet in England, is the more compelling of the two characters. Picoult embellishes what little is known about her, spinning a story of a quick-witted, “silver-eyed” beauty who is raised and educated “above her station” by the Countess of Kent. But Emilia’s childhood ends at age 13 when, in a financial arrangement brokered by a cousin, she becomes the courtesan of a much older man. Lord Hunsdon, also known as the Lord Chamberlain, essentially controlled London theater by licensing and censoring shows. Emilia learns the trade by helping him, but she has no delusions about her precarious place in society, or in her “beautiful cage” as Hunsdon’s mistress.   

Picoult cooks up one terrible ordeal after another for her heroine – including a forced marriage to a violently abusive man, the premature deaths of her closest friends (including the playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe), a stint in a filthy, rat-infested debtor’s prison, and the loss of her children. It all adds up to a stark portrait of what it means for a woman to have so little control over her life. 

The bleakness is alleviated by a passionate but risky clandestine affair between Emilia and the handsome young Earl of Southampton, which Picoult invents from whole cloth. Other sources of fulfillment are her sweet son Henry and her furtive, woefully underpaid playwriting gigs for William Shakespeare, whom Picoult portrays as both untalented and unscrupulous. 

Picoult has fun weaving lines from various Shakespeare plays into her narrative, including “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Othello,” “Hamlet,” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Each of these plays reflects what Emilia is going through as she pens them: her husband’s beastly attempts to “tame” her; his jealous rages; and thwarted love caused by feuding families or social inequality. Picoult also presents a radically different reading of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet, in which she has Emilia comparing her dead baby girl, rather than a lover, to a summer’s day.  

Shakespearean lines are also sprinkled through the contemporary chapters of “By Any Other Name,” in which Melina, a struggling young New York playwright, writes a powerful, eponymous play about her ancestor Emilia Bassano’s struggles to have her voice heard. Melina finally attracts a producer’s attention when her best friend, a gay Black man who’s also an aspiring playwright, submits her play to a competition under the androgynous byline Mel Green. Mayhem involving mistaken identities ensues. (Think “Twelfth Night.”) So does a star-crossed romance with a drama critic that turns into another comedy of errors. 

Subtlety is not Picoult’s strength, but strong storytelling and strongly held convictions about human rights are. Her love scenes are unfortunately tinted a deep purple and peopled with characters who breathe their lines rather than say them. (“”I did not think to see you today,’ Emilia breathed.”)       

Combining two interwoven narratives separated by centuries is a time-honored way for writers to explore parallels between eras and probe gaps in historical certainty. Few have done this to greater effect than Ali Smith, whose clever novel, “How to Be Both,” takes on different shades of meaning depending on which section, contemporary or historical, you read first. In A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” which is structured like an academic mystery, the contemporary heroine is, like Melina, both thematically and genetically tied to the novel’s historical protagonist.  

A question underlying “By Any Other Name” is whether it’s more important for your work or your name to endure. Picoult argues in this substantive novel that, while a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, even sweeter is being recognized for your achievements.